Thursday, May 26, 2016

Ideation in India

Our second and final day with SELCO Foundation was filled with creative brainstorming activities.Our second and final day with SELCO Foundation was filled with creative brainstorming activities. Our first session went over the concepts of social innovation, sustainability, and human-centric design. These themes were kept in mind throughout the day as we exercised our entrepreneurial skills. After the lecture portion, we played a quick energizer activity.

Congratulations to Rachel and Jackie for their ability to count, say “spaghetti,” and memorize shopping lists!

We divided into teams based on our interests in problems that slum colonies face. Each group recorded three key insights to our problem that we had gleaned from our slum visit the previous day. After a few minutes of chatting with our team members, we wrote a “How might we...” statement. For example, “How might we minimize the health impacts of human defecation in slum communities?” Our problem statements led us to a rapid-fire brainstorming session from which we chose our final solution.

We recharged over lunch and jotted down storyboard pictures to describe the problem, solutions, and outcomes. The final two hours of the day were spent giving creative pitches to our class and the SELCO staff. Each team was grilled with questions for the purpose of “poking holes” in our solutions. While it was tough to hear the criticisms, the experience taught us how to think like an entrepreneur in the social venture space.